


In Kind—An "As Usual" Sequel

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Unlikely pr0n inspired by Wagner [2]
Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Implied Sexual Content, Male-Female Friendship, Payback, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 03:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5769157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"After the tiger, the sun comes up and the sun goes down. After what happened in that filthy basement. On that filthy mattress. The world goes on as usual. They go on as usual, and she wonders if she's finally gone mad."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Long ago, in an opera house not far away, I was seeing Wagner's Parsifal and Brain decided that a little sumpin' sumpin' happened in that basement when Caskett were cuffed together (Cuffed, 4 x 10). This is the sequel to that, long-awaited by no one.

 

* * *

 

After the tiger, the sun comes up and the sun goes down. After what happened in that filthy basement. On that filthy mattress. The world goes on as usual. _They_ go on as usual, and she wonders if she's finally gone mad. If all the therapy in the world couldn't fix her, and now she's the only one living in a world where that _happened_.

But she can't have imagined it. Mad or not. Broken or not, she can't have imagined her thighs straddling his. Planting her knees and arching back. Letting herself fall, knowing he'd catch her, and still, hissing at the searing heat of his palms on her bare skin. Waist and spine and shoulder blades under the rucked up fabric of her sweater. Everywhere. His words weaving in and out of the sounds that must have come from her. Could only have come from her.

She can't have imagined it. Tender, wicked words, barely coherent in the end, and then laughter. The two of them weak with it. Her own voice, so strong and honest and open. Almost unrecognizable to either of them.

_I owe you._

A promise she can't have imagined.

But the sun comes up and the sun goes down. They're no different, and she thinks she must have. Because if she hadn't—if it had really happened—he couldn't simply set her coffee down exactly as he has a hundred mornings before. He couldn't laugh along with Ryan and Esposito and lounge in his chair and wander around pestering everyone just like always.

But he does. He is.

And even so, when she closes her eyes at night—when the sun goes down—she tastes his skin on her tongue, and her thighs ache. Her hand drifts to the tender places, almost bruises, but not quite, where she pressed hard against him. She feels his arms around her and the sharp, sweet longing of his kiss when they finally got it right. Everything between them, strong and steady and true, even with the edge of her desire worn away.

When she closes her eyes at night, she knows she didn't imagine it.

* * *

 

She watches him as another week draws to a close. As the year wanes and the world grows darker. She looks for any kind of sign, and there are little things. He helps her into her coat every night. Gently lifts her hair free of the collar, and his hands aren't quick to leave her shoulders.

He hovers at her back, closer than necessary. Lingering just a little longer than he did a week before. Little things. Incremental motion, but she's not sure where the lines are any more. Then and now. Real and imagined. With him and not with him.

She watches him, stern with herself as she tries hard to bring her professional eye to bear. He tugs at his left cuff more often. That's factual. Tick marks she makes on the curling-up corner of a legal pad, and she has to cover them with her hand when he asks. When she doesn't answer and the words fall away, but he's still asking. He keeps his eyes on her. His palm flat, not quite touching hers on the lined yellow page. He's still asking, and there they are. Factual, but she's ruthless with herself. She shakes her head and mouths _Nothing._

He nods and there might be disappointment in it. It might be punctuation this time when he tugs at his cuff and fiddles with his watch band.

Or it might be something else entirely. He worries at the chafed skin of his wrist, and that might be all it is. The itch and burn of a scar.

That might be what it is to him. What _she_ is: A scar.

* * *

 

She's on her way back from a trip for the world's least necessary coffee. He's on his feet. He's shrugging into his coat, and she wonders if he even meant to wait for her to get back.

"You're going." She doesn't mean to let the words slip out. Certainly doesn't mean to let a week's worth of agony go along for the ride.

"Yeah." He says it casually enough, but he stops in the act of settling the collar of his coat as though he's suddenly uncertain. He shouldn't be, though. The clock has well and truly run out on the week, and every phone in the bullpen seems to have fallen simultaneously silent in deference. "Figured you'd be heading out?"

The question mark is definite. Nothing else is. For him or her, and he's disconcerted. _She's_ disconcerted. It's been a week, and she has next to nothing. A meager pile of evidence that it happened at all. Less than that to indicate it means anything, and now he's going.

Except he's not going. He's lingering with his collar half sticking up, and for a single, mad moment, she thinks about closing the gap between them. She thinks about reaching up to smooth down the soft wool and set it to rights, just like he would if the roles were reversed.

Incremental movement.

She thinks about it, but she's not him.

"Yeah. Out. Heading out," she says, too brightly. She's in motion. A flurry of activity as she hauls her bag out of the bottom desk drawer and shrugs into her coat unassisted for the first time in a week. The first time since the tiger. "Nothing going on here, is there?"

"Not a thing." The words are swift. Smooth. He's trying to match her tone and not quite getting there. His hands twitch at his sides. A disappointed half motion in her direction before they fall away. "Nothing going on."

* * *

 

She's restless when she gets home in a way she thinks of as not like her. She can't settle in any given spot. Can't apply herself to any given task. She starts things and leaves them half finished. Not-quite-sorted laundry scattered on the couch. An abandoned book slapped down on the kitchen counter hard enough to crack the spine and splay the pages wide for all eternity. An almost untouched glass of wine she left somewhere.

_Somewhere_

She looks around the apartment, and it feels like the problem. It feels like the wrong somewhere, and it's more than just the disarray. More than the stack of towels doomed to topple or the glass of wine she finds sitting exactly in the center of the freezer's empty top shelf.

She stands in the middle of it all. She leans one way, then the other. She turns a half circle and suddenly realizes it's her. That this is more than unease or preoccupation. That _she's_ the wrong somewhere. She has been since the tiger.

_I owe you._

She closes her eyes for a long moment. She tastes his skin under her tongue. Her thighs ache and she feels the heat of his palms everywhere.

She's in motion.

* * *

 

She's freezing by the time she turns the corner on to his hallway. Out of breath, and it's a blue-knuckled fist that falls, soundless, just shy of the door. Her mind, curiously silent since she twisted the key in her own lock and set out, is suddenly roaring with a litany of every thing wrong with this. Wrong with her.

It's December, and her arms are bare. She looks down at her feet, half surprised, half relieved to see she at least has shoes on. She ran here through the tail end of rush hour, some after-the-fact justification about not wanting to be trapped in a cab or subway car not even occurring to her until she'd eaten up a third of the distance from her place to his.

His place. That's next up in the litany. The laughable idea that _this_ is the right somewhere. His place. His _home,_ complete with his family right behind this very door, and what exactly was her plan anyway? To march him through to the bedroom calling to Martha and Alexis over her shoulder that they'll just be a little while because she owes him?

She scrapes her hands through her hair, not quite ready to laugh at herself, if that's what this strangled thing sitting high in her chest is going to be. Not quite ready to turn right around and head back out into the night. She shivers violently, and however wrong this is—however laughably wrong—she can't imagine going home without knowing.

_Knowing._ She forms the word with her lips, wondering what she could possibly mean by it. Which of a hundred things she might _know_ if she were to raise a blue-knuckled fist again.

Whether it really happened.

What it meant.

If he thinks about it or he'd rather pretend it was all some bizarre dream.

_Knowing._ Whatever it means, it's not in the cards for her tonight. Whatever courage or determination the epiphany in her apartment afforded has drained away. It's left her feeling foolish and small on his doorstep.

She can fix the last part at least. She's made up her mind to it. She's just turned back down the hallway and managed one heavy step, then another when the door swings open behind her.

* * *

 

"Beckett?"

It's another definite question mark at the end of her name. Not because he isn't glad to see her. He's heart-wrenchingly glad, and the plain truth is she's just as glad to see him. Every single morning. Right here and now, even though she'd be equally glad of a convenient sinkhole to swallow her up.

"I thought I heard . . ." He breaks off and opens the door wider, only just now taking in the mess she is. Pleasure turns to concern. He reaches for her arm, but she snatches it back.

"I didn't mean to bother you." The silence strikes her. The emptiness of the space behind him. ". . . all," she adds weakly.

"Just me. College weekend again." He frowns, not really paying attention to his own answer. "Beckett, where's your coat?"

She frowns, not really paying attention to the question. "Just you."

She's too practical to think its any kind of sign. Even in this strange after-the-tiger in between, it's just a fact that he's alone, like tick marks on a page and the chafing on his wrist and hers. Like the not-quite bruises, almost gone now. It's a not-particularly-surprising piece of information.

_Just him._

She's ruminating on it. The opportunity it presents. She's considering it in ruthlessly practical terms, and it takes her a second to realize he's talking to her. That he's holding out one arm to usher her in. He's rather carefully not touching her.

"Kate," he says gently. "Is something wrong?"

"Yes." It seems like an opening. Anything to untie her tongue, but his cheeks lose some of their color. "No!"

He looks anything but reassured by the practically shouted correction. She gives into the giddy laugh that bubbles up in her. Panic and uncertainty and gladness all spilling over. She reaches for him. She tugs his mouth down to hers. It's awkward. The sharp bite of her tooth against the inside of her own lip jerks her back.

"Not wrong." The words are coming out of order. The things she means to say, but she's eager to kiss him again. Eager to get it right. "Nothing wrong." She sneaks in something brief and demure. Unsatisfying. "I just . . . I owe you."

She finds his mouth again. They get it right.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "He can't possibly help but respond, but it's troubling. Her skin is ice cold, and even though the way she's launching herself at him knocks his ability to reason all to hell, there's something about all this that's more than a little desperate."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Chapter 2 of this sequel to Parsifal-inspired PWP. It was a two-shot tag for Cuffed (4 x 10), but an epilogue hopped on.

 

She's kissing him. His brain keeps telling him that, though it comes in a distant second to every other part of his body in reporting the news. She's just inside his front door, amped up and shivering from cold and something she can't name. Can't or won't or simply _doesn't_ name, because she's kissing him instead.

He can't help but respond. Instantly. So immediately that it feels like prescience. Like déjà vu, as he braces for the first hard, clumsy knock of tooth and bone. It comes, but then there's the surprise of the shy peck she steals. The one that makes him never-been-kissed nervous and elated and untethered. That's when his arms go around her and the door slams and she gives a delighted little crow of triumph that's sweet and perfect on his tongue.

He can't possibly help but respond, but it's troubling. Her skin is ice cold, and even though the way she's launching herself at him knocks his ability to reason all to hell, there's something about all this that's more than a little desperate. Something unsettling that works him loose from the moment and calls up the unpleasant truth that she was sneaking away when he opened the door. The bewildering fact that she's here at all, kissing him with a vengeance, she doesn't exactly seem to have planned on it.

His back hits the wall, courtesy of every coiled ounce of strength in her deceptively elegant body. They're half a turn from the wide open double doors to his bedroom. Half a turn from everything that implies, and her hands are everywhere. _His_ hands are everywhere, and she's all fierce, undulating encouragement.

She's kissing him and more. Far more than just that, and he wants badly to surrender. He's lived a week with memory swamping his senses. Scent and sound and warmth. A week imagining the luxury of having both hands free to take her to pieces.

But the curse of being him these days is a mind that won't shut up. A wary, lovesick heart that can't forget what it was like to wait alone for months. What it's like to be waiting still. The curse of being him is enough left-over fury that he's suddenly cold. Stiff-armed as he pries her body from his and holds her at arm's length.

"You owe me?"

She nods soundlessly. Vigorously until she has breath enough to gasp out something disjointed, and she's _on_ him the whole time, fierce and relentless.

_Yes. Owe ._

It takes him longer than it should to make sense of it. But she's managed to untuck his shirt somewhere along the way. She's dragging the nails of one hand down his ribs while the other hand sets to work on his belt, so he's pretty sure no jury would convict him for coasting his lips all along the deep, scooped neckline of her shirt while he puts it together.

_Yes. Owe ._

_"Kate."_ Her name comes out loud enough to rattle the glass in the doors. "You _owe_ me? Because of . . . because . . ."

There's nothing he can say. No words for what happened that aren't appallingly literal and adolescent and so far from the whole story that it's practically a lie. There's nothing.

"You know," she says. She reaches for him again. She fists her hands in his shirt front, and he feels something not entirely pleasant building in her. A troubling answer building in him. "You _know_ what happened . . ."

"I _know."_ He kisses her roughly, a week's worth of frustrated wondering rising to the surface as he lets his body press into her. A year's worth of wanting her. "Do you think I've been able to think about anything else?"

He feels something work its way up through her. A rumble in her chest. An almost pained sound that he thinks might be a laugh, bleak and bewildered. It twists through him unpleasantly, leaving fear behind. Dread closing in that this could all go badly. Very, _very_ badly, but he presses on. He can't help but press on.

"A debt. Is that what this is?" He opens his mouth against her throat, trying to drive the image of the tiger from his head. The image of her falling under a blue sky. Desire and fear and desire again. He tastes her, desperate to untangle the two from one another, but it feels hopeless. He has her by the arms. He pushes off the wall, stumbling with her as he tries to open up enough distance to think, but that's hopeless, too. His mouth keeps finding hers, even though he's angry and aghast and fearful. "You got yours, so I get mine? A one-time thing and you go on your way? Is that what you _think?"_

_"_ She tears herself away all at once, and he can't blame her. The words are awful. Ugly and born of a wound so deep—a fear so buried—he hadn't remembered it was there.

She tears herself away. She looks at him for one wide-eyed instant, her hands raised high and away from his body, and he realizes that whatever brought her here—whatever else is going on inside her—she's frightened. Of what happened in that basement. Of days and days without a single word from either of them about it. Of being here now and every possible outcome she's imagined. That she's still imagining, and he doesn't know. He has _no_ idea what she's thinking.

"Talk to me, Kate." He feels quiet inside. Not calm—nothing like calm—but quiet, as if he's plucked something festering from his own heart in the terrible act of asking. "I know what happened, but I don't know what this is."

"A mistake." Her voice is low, the words pitched toward the floor so he can barely make them out. "This was a mistake. I should . . ."

She moves swiftly away. Her hand is on the door and she's half out into the hallway when he grabs for her wrist. She hisses between her teeth. He's managed to hit just where her skin is still raw. Where his own is.

"No." He shifts his hold and draws her back inside. "Not a mistake." He raises the marred skin to his lips, closing the door again as he gently traces the injury. "Not then. Not now."

"Castle, _don't_." She turns her face away, but that's the extent of the struggle.

"Don't what?" He lowers her hand with infinite car, trailing his fingers up to her shoulder. Her cheek to sweep the hair back and press his lips to the flare of color there. "Don't worry how you got here like this?" He wraps a loose hand around her upper arm, his thumb trailing warmth over her still-icy skin. "Don't wonder why . . . "

"I don't know," she cuts in miserably. "I don't know what I was thinking." She looks up at him like she's begging for mercy, and he'd give it if he knew how. "I owe you." It's just her lips in the shape of the words this time. No sound at all, like they're a talisman. Like they're proof against fear and uncertainty.

He falls a little further in love with her. He falls a little harder, because she's fierce and tenacious and frightened and angry and too stupidly proud and broken and independent to let anybody in to help her. To let _him_ in, and still she's here and he sees it for what it is, this foolishness that's not even _close_ to any kind of plan. He sees it's a door she's left open the tiniest crack.

"You owe me," he echoes, and when he kisses her this time, he's just a man in love. It's not stolen or desperate or fearful. It's warm and slow and sweet as he winds his arms around her waist and pulls her body into his. "Do I get to pick?" He drags his lips to her ear. Soft nips and firm kisses with just a hint of teeth. "Do I, Kate?"

She nods against his chest. He feels her hands shaking and the shallowness of her breath. He kisses her again and she kisses him back willingly. More than willingly, but still her fingers curl into his sleeves. She's hanging on, and it hurts that she needs to. It hurts that they're in two such different places, and he doesn't know what to do about that. He doesn't know if there's any right thing, but she's here and they can't go on doing nothing. He feels the weight of her body against his and knows neither of them wants to go on doing nothing.

"Then you'll stay." He lets the words loose without thought. A decision to not decide. To let them mean what they mean for now.

"Stay?" Her spine is abruptly straight. Rigid with fear and uncertainty, but he leaves his arms loose at her waist. He's not inclined to let her go, but he won't struggle either.

"Stay." He kisses the top of her head. "For a while." Her temple. "For dinner." The tired creases at the corner of one eye, then the other. "Until you fall asleep drooling on me in front of a stupid movie."

"I don't drool," she insists. It's the only thing she's sounded sure of since he caught her on his doorstep.

"Then definitely stay." It's a smiling murmur into the angle of her jaw. "Until the cows come home or you're old and grey." The corner of her mouth as she opens it to protest. "For now." A shy press of his lips against hers. "Just stay, Kate."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well, I worked this to death, and then a short epilogue hopped on. Posting that in just a minute.


	3. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She stays"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Unwelcome epilogue to a sequel I didn't intend to write .

 

She stays.

It's stilted at first. An expanding universe of space they keep between them by mutual, unspoken agreement.

"Hungry?" he asks, and she nods twice. Once because it seems like she should. Once because it's true. The cold and still-buzzing want have left her starving.

"Yeah," she adds, because it's ridiculous. The silence is ridiculous, and then she blushes bright when he smiles like a single, inane word from her is some kind of gift.

He disappears and reappears, in and out of cabinets and the refrigerator and from underneath the island. He holds things up and out to her. She wrinkles her nose or nods eagerly. He makes her laugh in fits and starts, and it's easier.

"Let me," she says sliding from her perch on a stool to knock his hands out of the way. The nearness is electric. The pull of her body to his and vice versa.

"Bossy," he rumbles, letting his lips graze her cheek as he hands off the knife and leaves her to it. Slicing cheese and arranging crackers and fruit and other odds and ends on a plate while he makes a vast bowl of popcorn in a kettle on the stovetop.

They carry their feast to his office in stages. Plates and glasses and bowls and a bottle of wine she's not sure is a good idea. He spreads a blanket on the floor in front of the leather chairs and loots the living room for pillows. For another blanket, because she's still shivering.

He puts on a stupid movie. They eat too much. They barter over the last of things. Grapes for the last of the blue cheese. Chocolate-covered almonds for popcorn. Her fingers creep out and tangle through his. He shoves the plates and bowls aside and curls his arm around her. He kisses her forehead. She presses her lips to the underside of his jaw.

They laugh and don't laugh. Ignore the movie entirely and rewind when he swears it's a good part. She throws the blanket over his legs, too, and scoots closer. They fall asleep with his head tipped back against the chair arm and hers resting on his chest.

She doesn't drool.

* * *

 

"Kate." He wakes her gently. The TV screen is blue and the traffic outside has leveled off as much as it ever does.

"How late?" She stretches out her toes and her fingers, pushing at the warm, tired feeling that runs all through her.

_"To Catch a Thie_ f late." He covers the face of her dad's watch with his hand. He murmurs against her ear. "There's the couch." He kisses her neck. "Guest room . . ." Another kiss, lingering this time. Dangerous and heavy with the next logical stop on that particular tour.

"I should go," she says, but she turns her body into his, one arm tucked against her chest, the other slung loosely over his hip.

"Should." He manhandles her almost into his lap. "Not _should_. But if you want to . . ."

"Don't want to." She laughs into his shoulder. "But should."

* * *

 

He wraps her up in a coat. One of his, and she doesn't argue, even though it's ridiculous with half a dozen others right there that would fit better. He winds a scarf around her neck, and she's only just barely draws the line at a hat and gloves.

"You're stalling," she says, batting his hands away.

"I'm concerned for your well being. Someone should be." He gives a theatrical sniff, then breaks. "I'm absolutely stalling."

But the phone rings, then. The night doorman has a cab waiting.

"I'm glad you came," he says gruffly. He busies himself tucking the ends of the scarf into the coat. "This was . . ." He trails off. Her eyes and his snag. A heated glance, and she's kissing him. "That," he finishes breathlessly.

"That." She agrees, laughing and stealing one more kiss. "Definitely that."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: OMGWTFBBQEPILOGUE? Thank you for reading.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. The second, shorter chapter should be up by the end of the week.


End file.
